09/03/2026
‼️CASSAVA‼️
Many Africans are under the assumption that cassava is a staple and a native plant to Africa. Not so. It’s a hybrid that was introduced by the foreigners. It has been highly modified, cassava contains chemicals called cyanogenic glycosides, which can release cyanide in the body when consumed. Cyanide poisoning may impair thyroid and nerve function and contains starch which is a dangerous combination to a human body. It’s affects the neurological system and clogs up the lymphatic system.
Cassava was domesticated in Brazil about 10,000 years ago and was introduced on the Kenyan Coast by the Portuguese in the 16th century.
Unlike many other crops, cassava was introduced as a means of combating famine. “Root crops”, stated H. Wolfe, the deputy director (plant industry) in 1936, “are considered to be one of the best forms of insuring against famine because they are drought-resistant and provide a steady supply of food from the underground tubers at times when other crops are drought-stricken or destroyed by locusts”. Cassava, apart from Irish and sweet potatoes and yams, was destined to serve this purpose.
In the 1930s, the department of agriculture carried out many trials to determine which cassava varieties could be grown in African reserves.
Sweet varieties with the least cyanide were preferred to the bitter ones.
Trials with so many varieties demonstrated the perseverance of the colonial plant breeders. In contrast, the means by which cassava was introduced were quite authoritarian, paternalistic and inconsiderate of African opinion and dietary preferences.
For instance, as soon as locusts invaded western Kenya in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, district agricultural and administrative officers exhorted people to grow cassava and sweet potatoes.
What was inappropriate was the belief by the European officials and Christian missionaries that the use of force was necessary to make Africans grow the crops.
Fr G. Brandsma of the Prefectorate Apostolic of Kavirondo, the present-day Kisumu Diocese, was among those who used force. He wrote to Sir Joseph Aloysius Byrne, Kenya’s governor at the time, that unless severe pressure was used, Africans would not plant the crops.
This is the way colonial authorities encouraged the growing of root crops during the rest of the 1930s. These were particularly used with renewed vigour during the 1943 territory-wide famine and intermittently during the years that followed through independence.
Unfamiliarity with cassava caused people in Embu and Kirinyaga to refer to the 1943 crisis as famine of cassava (Yura ria Mianga and Ng’aragu ya Mianga, respectively.
Such reference signifies the fact that colonial food policy never carefully considered what Africans ate and how new foods should be integrated into their diets.
In spite of this failure, the growing of cassava and other root crops was grafted into anti-soil erosion schemes in subsequent years up to 1963.
Both were carried out under more ferocious force than before and fed into the many other grievances that led to the outbreak of the Mau Mau uprising in 1952.
